Description
In The sea with no one in it, Niki Koulouris takes readers from the mysterious and powerful depths of the ocean to the familiar and disparate artifacts of our land-locked daily lives.
About the author
Niki Koulouris was born in Melbourne, Australia, and is a graduate of the University of Melbourne and RMIT University. She has worked as a staff writer and editor at Victoria University. Her poetry and prose has appeared in The Cortland Review, Space, Subtext Magazine and The Age. A beer enthusiast, she has been known to start spontaneous lists on napkins of her top India Pale Ales. Niki lives in Toronto. The sea with no one in it is her first book.
Awards
- Short-listed, Wesley Michel Wright Prize
- Short-listed, ReLit Awards, Poetry
Excerpt: The sea with no one in it (by (author) Niki Koulouris)
1.
It looks like the ocean
with its cargo of gunpowder and ash
bottles the colour of bulls
from another era
longhorns moving ahead
and not much else
once it had been
half man, half sea
unhealed, yet unwounded
by the greyest of steeples
I do not think of the deep
what has been worn
will be worn again by sheiks
why leave these shores
when the rest of the waves
will come to us
what more can they bring us
these waves
with their formula-one
alligator instincts
but vast zithers
and drop sheets that
fall short of rafts.
11.
Today of all days
this is the sea with no one in it
is this all it will be
unable to dye all it touches
in primitive ink
what could you give the sea
but your stripes,
since you ask,
your war paint, your blindfolds
your appetite for westerns
in exchange for waves
as wide as trains
from the next frontier.
17.
It was there all along
as if undiscovered
the modern sea
already alive, sawn off
craved by gravel
summoned by the populace
that salvaged pendants
from the surgery of tides
even though it was the sea
it did not seem like it
nor did it seem like what it could be
it was not the sea I missed
on its way to another age
It has always been like the sky
on a day no one is born
it has become its counterpart
a half icon, as permanent,
from where can it be seized
how should it be adorned?
Editorial Reviews
'There is something entrancing about Koulouris's poetry. It makes readers want to dive deep within it, to drown. Its rhythms are intoxicating and, like a riptide, refuse to let go. The surface appearance of simplicity belies the poems' complex and daunting depth.'
Anthony Frame
'Niki Koulouris' poems take up the contemporary challenges of environmentalism and ekphrasis?poems about other kinds of artifice, including statuary and Stelarc?in a global frame. Her pithy, often punchy poems mix the sentimental with the acerbic, Alpine cigarettes with "Lolly Gobble Bliss Bomb bliss." Above all, Koulouris's topic is the sea that "never closes/unlike the sun," with all its mutability and absoluteness.'
Wesley Michael Wright Prize citation
The first section comprises a sustained seascape. Sound patterns and seductive brief phrases play off a metaphysical sense of the ocean, and its power over the imagination, against more concrete images and ideas. Words and phrases nudge against each other and form alliances.... [In] Part 2 ... a number of ekphrastic poems exuberantly inhabit the work of modern artists and ancient monuments. Some readers will readily relate to the evocations of the work of Anselm Kiefer, Philip Guston and Maurice Sendak, and to Berlin's Pergamon Museum. Others will be intrigued enough to seek out the originals.
Australian Poetry Journal
'In her debut poetry collection, Niki Koulouris stands, as many have before her, at the lip of the sea. New from the Porcupine's Quill press, The sea with [no one] in it is a sparse re-examining of the water that surrounds us, the preternatural body on our shores. The collection rattles with the detritus of land-meets-depths, as spare and exact as a ship in a bottle.'
The Telegraph-Journal
'One can sight in Kouloris's work the surrealism of the Greek poet Yannis Ritsos, but also the fabulous imagination of Leonard Cohen's Greek-flavoured poems and songs of the 1960s. Indeed, almost any stanza from Koulouris could be inserted into Cohen's "Suzanne."'
Maple Tree Literary Supplement